TD 1
was all ballad focused?” DD: “No, there was all s
orts – Sinatra, Country and Western, Ella Fitzgerald…” DB: “I got a bit of Sinatra in me nanny’s house. My grandad would have been singing a bit of that.” DD: “Do you think that hip hop has awakened the old poetic soul of Ireland in the youth here cause there’s so much more kids doing spoken word now?” DB: “Yeah, I think that’s fairly certain, but I think there’s a few things at play. It’s not just the popularity of hip hop alone because, I mean maybe I’m very ignorant to the history of Irish rap, but my knowledge is there wasn’t the same boom in terms of hip hop in the days of Scary Éire as there is now. They were almost a misnomer, a stand out, an excellent stand out. (‘incredible’ intersects Dempsey.) “I’d love to trace more of the genesis of musical storytelling. I do think there is a very clear historical thread between the seanchaí and vocal storytelling today. “On hip hop alone, I do think there’s a lot going on and I don’t think it gets talked about enough is the access to making music in the first place. People cracking software, getting cheap laptops and USB microphones, any of these things that broke down the barriers between you and the massive studio set-up, you and the financial barrier of going inside somewhere to make music. I think opening that up has allowed for so many more voices to come forward and once you have one friend with the microphone, the speakers and a couple of very basic boom bap beats, I think that can be enough to encourage you to follow the path.” DD: “When my mate took his own life. I went on the spirits, the early houses and all. I fucked off to London for a year. Like Dave was saying (in terms of fooling oneself), ‘This is great, I’m grand now. That’s what happens in life, people die and you just move on,’ whilst lashing brandy into you and loads of e tablets. I’d be losing half the week from the sessions. I wouldn’t be able to write and was drowning my creativity.” We move on to discussing the creative process and how they approach it. Damien does it during the week when he’s fresh. David is reluctant to turn it into “a thing of labour” and risk “falling out of love with this thing which has given me so much hope and space.” We the discuss the importance of who you surround yourself and get advice from. DB: “I only really deal with two people. I had no interest in doing music professionally, I liked doing music in my shed and that was it. They (his managers Ash Houghton and Theo Lalic) pressed me and started coming over and spending time here. I took a level of trust in these two young guys who, I would say, have had a similar life to me and a lot of parallels. I think they have a similar sense of reverence and responsibility around music and what it can be and mean to people. I feel at this stage there’s an understanding between us. But really, it’s friends and family where proper counsel comes from, it’s ringing me ma… My ma doesn’t have the first clue about music or business, but she has a gut feeling about things. It was my ma who encouraged me in the first place saying, you should give this a shot, you should see how it goes. She’s got the intuition.” Damien is back on his questions. DD: “Were you ever told much about our vibrant bardic history in this land and how important poetry and the poet was to our ancestors and how esteemed the bards were in our society?” DB: “No, and I didn’t know what a bard was until I was about 20. In fact, I do have the word ‘bard’ written on my page when I was thinking about you. It never came up in school and if it did it wasn’t brought up in a memorable fashion. It never came up in my external music history even from the likes of my uncle, there was no exposure to an Irish music history beyond the 20th century. When I was writing this album, at first I was reading a lot about Sydney Owenson, who is a very interesting figure in Irish music and one of the great Irish harpists. And from there, I read a lot more about the history of Irish music, particularly about harpists because I was trying to teach myself the harp at that time. “Even still, in those books they were almost struggling to draw on references. It seems like the history may not have been properly explored or archived. I know I have missed out massively on that part of my musical understanding. Likewise with storytelling, how little I know about the seanchaí. My favourite thing about going to see any trad acts over the years has been the history lesson before they played the song, this capsule of history.” DD: I was lucky, the ballad boom was still going when I was young. We had The Furies and The Dubliners, Christy Moore and the Dublin City Ramblers.” DB: “You grew up in a singing house and it DD: “Did you ever hear Lisdoonvarna? Sure Christy was doing hip hop a long time before others.” Balfe laughs in agreement. We’re about an hour into the conversation. DB: “You were talking about Lethal Dialect earlier and I know Paulie but I don’t know the rest of the lads well and I hold GI in a spot of reverence as the best Irish producer of all time. I can’t explain how enthralled I am by his production. I see the collective and the group encouragement that all evolves around house to house and bedroom to bedroom with access to laptops, speaker and microphone and that was the exact same experience I had with my friends, everyone coming to my shed with a 200 quid laptop and a microphone. I don’t think Paul (Curran) would have done the spoken word if we hadn’t been fumbling our way through then world making music as teenagers together and I don’t think we’d have been doing that unless my uncle gave me an old computer that his job was throwing out with a piece of cracked software on it.” Dempsey references a track he recently recorded in a bedroom in Balgriffin with God Creative, Teddy Darling and Chris Cabs about the link with Ireland and Jamaica. We chat about how the route to exposure is easier these days, but the challenge is staying focused. DD: “It depends how stubborn you are and if you want to see the people who told you were shite and you’ll never do nothing and what are you doing and your wasting your time. It depends if you want to just look at them someday and smile at them and see them shrivel… the look of certain people, they won’t look at you.” 22